When people say “AI” today, many of them are thinking about ChatGPT, image generators, voice assistants, translation tools, coding copilots, or systems that can summarise documents in seconds. These tools feel new, powerful and sometimes mysterious. Yet the main engine inside many of them is not a sudden invention from 2022. It is a family of ideas that has been growing, failing, returning and improving for more than 80 years: the artificial neural network.
This is why neural networks deserve to be called the unsung heroes of the current artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. The public sees the chatbot. The public sees the generated image. The public sees the smart search result. But behind the screen, the modern AI system usually depends on layers of artificial “neurons” learning patterns from data.
